New York Police Take Broad Steps in Facing Terror

Published: February 15, 2004

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The city also faces other potential obstacles. While a catastrophic attack would undoubtedly put the police to work beside the Fire Department, as well as a variety of other agencies, the two uniformed services have yet to complete a set of formal rules for how they should respond to disasters, a requirement to receive federal funds, despite plans to complete them by last summer. And enduring tensions between the two agencies remain.

Further complicating matters, the city's Office of Emergency Management, the agency charged under the City Charter with coordinating the response during a disaster, has been without a commissioner since October.

"The traditional rivalry between the police and other departments is worse than ever," said Jerome M. Hauer, a former acting assistant secretary of health and human services for biodefense in the Bush administration who now heads a biodefense center at George Washington University. Mr. Hauer also served as the city's first emergency management director.

A spokesman for Mr. Kelly, Paul J. Browne, dismissed the criticism, noting that Mr. Hauer campaigned on behalf of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's onetime rival, Mark Green. He cited what he said were a raft of measures Mr. Kelly had taken to improve relations with the Fire Department.

But Mr. Kelly acknowledged that no one was overconfident.

"I know that we've done more about this problem than any other police department in the country, but that's not enough," Mr. Kelly said. "It's like an onion: you peel it off and there are so many other issues that emerge."

A High-Tech Wall of Defense

Early detection, experts have long argued, is perhaps the most important aspect of a response to a biological or chemical attack. And so for months, New York has been trying to acquire the most sophisticated detection equipment available.

To that end, the city has been working with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, developers of the autonomous pathogen detection system, a set of devices that not only continuously monitor the air, but also automatically detect and identify, through multiple simultaneous testing, the presence of more than 100 different bacteria or viruses - within 45 minutes.

Fully automated, they operate 24 hours a day for an entire week without servicing or human intervention, said John M. Dzenitis, a Livermore engineer in charge of the program.

J. Patrick Fitch, the head of Livermore's chemical and biological national security program, said the detector's ability to test for more than 100 agents by seeking protein and DNA signatures distinguished it from other detectors. He said Washington had invested almost $20 million since 1998 in developing the system, which has been field-tested at the Albuquerque and San Francisco airports, and in Washington's Metro transit system.

"This is as close to instant detection as any system has come," said Dani-Margot Zavasky, the physician and infectious-disease specialist whom the city's counterterrorism bureau hired as its medical director in 2002.

Because germs spread rapidly, hours can mean the difference between warding off an epidemic and allowing it to take hold. If the city were attacked with smallpox, it would have only four days to vaccinate people potentially exposed to the virus, which kills about a third of those infected.

But city and federal officials caution that the pathogen detection system is not ready to operate outdoors or on its own because, among other things, it has yet to be "ruggedized." "That means we don't know if it can function well in ice or heat or high winds or with someone climbing all over it," one federal official said.

Federal and city counterterrorism officials said they hoped that several of the new detectors would be installed in time for use during the Republican convention.

For the moment, then, the city remains reliant on the technology in place at 30 cities nationwide. The system, known as Biowatch, uses environmental air monitors to sniff the air for about 15 potentially lethal pathogens. Ten of the portable, nondescript monitors are scattered throughout the city.

But Biowatch, officials acknowledge, does not provide "real-time detection." Federal officials or contract workers must collect filters from the monitors each day - or more often during a heightened threat - and take them to government labs for testing. This means at least a 24-hour delay before results are known.

But similar surveillance is going on elsewhere throughout the city. The Police Department has been using more than 700 personal radiation detectors for more than a year to identify unusual radioactive materials, checking trucks on the street and cars in garages around the city, among other objects.

And in a 14-month-old federal program, employees of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey equipped with radiation detection devices have been stationed at the entrances to New York bridges and tunnels, subways, airports and ports.

Eight Million Vaccinations

"No other city is as eager for everything we have to offer as New York," said Parney Albright, an assistant secretary of homeland security.